Editors’ Blog
All Political Power is Unitary
All political power is unitary. In the rare instances when I’ve given advice to people who have political power or money to support people who do, this is the central point I’ve emphasized. All political power is unitary. You can’t be gaining it in foreign policy and losing it on the domestic front. It’s all one thing. And this is particularly important right now for Democrats looking at what the President can accomplish during these critical two years in which Democrats hold both the White House and the Congress by the thinnest of margins. In fact, in political terms it is the most important thing happening right now.
Yesterday Axios ‘Sneak Peak’ blared this: “1 big thing: Biden faces Dem defections”. The story is about Democratic representatives and Senators in marginal seats trying to distance themselves from the situation in Afghanistan and President Biden. “Many moderate Democrats and their aides are huddling with campaign consultants over how to handle the setback in Afghanistan,” as they put it.
This is a cliche Axios storyline, entirely in line with the elite DC political reaction to recent events we’ve been discussing. But if it is an Axios comfort-zone storyline it’s one they know really well. Wobbly, Sunday show going Democratic moderates is their métier. And in this case it’s real.
Force, Future and Thinking Seriously About How Governments Fall
This morning The Washington Post published an illuminating new look at the fall of Kabul. What is most telling, however, is the commentary about the facts revealed in the article. First let’s look at the new details.
The flight of former President Ghani, which triggered the final collapse of the Afghan government, was driven at least in part by apparently false reports that Taliban fighters were in the palace searching for him. The more resonant claim is about the mechanics of the turnover of control in Kabul.
Where Things Stand: Giuliani Makes The Case That He’s ‘A Functioning’ Person 
It’s not me, it’s you.
America’s former mayor gave a rather blunt interview to NBC New York this week, addressing head on the fact that everyone thinks he’s basically lost his mind.
Remembering the Origins of the United States’ 20 Year War in Afghanistan
I wanted to flag to your attention this opinion piece for Robert Kagan in The Washington Post. It is an overarching look at the US mission in Afghanistan. Fundamentally it is an apologia, a defense. But Kagan is significantly more sophisticated and thoughtful than most of the more editorially kinetic defenders of the mission. So even while I think he’s mostly wrong and often disingenuous about recounting these events in which he played an important role you can nonetheless learn a lot about the last twenty years from reading his account. Be cautious, though, because the real essence is the many things left out.
One thing that Kagan is right about is this: Many retrospectives say the US went into Afghanistan with hubris and optimism and a mission to build a Western style democracy in Afghanistan. That’s not true. The US invaded Afghanistan because we were scared and angry. Kagan focuses on the “scared.” “Angry” was just as much it. But it was in the nature of that moment that the two were so fused that it was difficult to distinguish them.
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Where Things Stand: Bernie May Make A Few Pointed Pitstops On His Reconciliation Bill-Hyping Tour
While Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) centrist colleagues in the House try to flex their muscles ahead of the party’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package reaching their chamber, Sanders is planning to spend the next few weeks selling the bold legislation to Americans — specifically, Republican voters in the Midwest.
I’ve been working on a piece about critiques of the American people’s lack of “strategic patience” as evidenced by our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then I got this note from TPM Reader PT and thought, yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking.
I suspect that you, like me, have seen at least some commentators who argue that the Taliban “won” in Afghanistan by simply waiting us out, or that this demonstrates to other nations that consider an adversarial stance towards the US that we’re a paper tiger now that they know that even if we do take military action against them, all they have to do is wait for us to withdraw, which we inevitably will. I have a different perspective that I’d like to offer, starting with an analogy:
The Number Of Afghans We’re Supposed to Evacuate Keeps Spiraling Upward
I want to discuss an issue I’ve been watching unfold through the process of the evacuation from Kabul which has now been on-going for some ten days. As we’ve discussed, the fate of American allies in the country has become both a humanitarian mission as well as a cudgel used to attack the US withdrawal – both by those who wanted the US to stay in Afghanistan permanently and those who’ve wanted to use the inevitable messiness and chaos of the US withdrawal as a way to cleanse their own dirty hands and complicity in the misbegotten mission. But a key part of both dimensions of this question is that the number in need of evacuation is a moving target.
A week and a half ago reports had numbers in the range of 70,000 to 80,000 Afghan nationals needing to be evacuated – mostly so-called SIVs and their families. A greater number of people have now been flown out of the country, though a small percentage of those are US citizens and some large percentage is third country nationals. Today however The New York Times reports new numbers based on analyses of Pentagon records by an advocacy group called the Association of Wartime Allies. They find that as many as one million Afghan could be eligible for expedited immigration status and that a minimum of 250,000 are yet to be evacuated.
Watch The New Episode Of The Josh Marshall Podcast: Everbody’s Mad
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the centrist stunt in the House, the Afghanistan evacuation on a personal level, and what to make of the dip in President Biden’s approval numbers.
Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Where Things Stand: Abbott’s New Vax Mandate Ban Is Clearly Aimed At Big Schools
We spent a good chunk of last week covering various school districts in Florida, Texas and elsewhere that are standing up to their governors’ bans on mask policies in schools. The defiance has been interesting to watch play out — most are maintaining their mask policies, despite ongoing threats from the state level.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott just issued an executive order that looks like another escalation of that battle.